Saturday, March 19, 2016

Donald Trump and U.S. imperialism's " Ugly American " image


   Corporate America sponsors " patriotism " in matters of imperialist war. But the very " people " of America- in particular, working class people- are not the beneficiary of Corporate America's patriotic, protective instincts.
     There is indeed- and this is the root of many wars- a contradiction between global capitalist interests and the interests of the nation state- without which capitalism is vulnerable.

    In the 1930s German nationalism came into conflict with " international banking " , and the equally imperial interests of other advanced capitalist nations. Just a century after the Great War - with its nightmares like Verdun- the nation state system of the world is about to explode again.

   Wilsonian blather - " make the world safe for democracy "- got us into that mess. The Great War also had this unforeseen consequence : the Russian Revolution of 1917.

    U.S. imperialism was also a major cause of Fidel Castro's July 26 Revolution in 1959. Soon all Latin America was exploding.

   .Exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky found asylum in Mexico - through the grace of the Mexican Revolution. [ " In 1938, Trotsky wrote that 'the Cárdenas’ régime was with no doubt the bravest and most honest government of those times.'  Even today we can still clearly see that President Cárdenas has been the best representative that the social ideas of the Mexican Revolution have had at the head of the State."  ]


    Where did the world get " The Ugly American" image  ? Donald Trump fits that image perfectly.

   The contradiction between global capitalism and capitalist based nationalism can cause a collapse of the European Union. Nobody wants the new migrants.

[    "To say, as Marx did, that capitalists have no nation is certainly to say that they have no national loyalties and will move wherever the imperatives of profit-maximization take them, but it certainly doesn’t mean that they have no roots in, or no need for, the state or for their own nation-state in particular. The need to maximize profit has always involved certain requirements of organization and enforcement (among other things, to keep the working class in place) which up to now have been, and in the foreseeable future still promise to be, fulfilled above all by nation-states  ".]

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